As I wasn’t at the UN’s Doha Climate Conference myself, I am delighted to offer you this first-hand take from Christopher Monckton of Brenchley. Many thanks Christopher.

Slowly, inexorably, expensively, the U.N. climate “process” is dying. At Copenhagen, 45,000 attended. At Doha, 17,000 registered. Fewer came. The “Save-The-Planet” fervour has gone. The talks are now mere freak-shows for profiteering Indian mystics dressed in two-tone Dralon curtains, peddlers of perpetual-motion machines and CO2-filtration masks, chanters of “green” music and the last few Marxists on Earth.

After 18 successive annual conferences, the wearisome choreography is well practised. “Success” must always be declared. This year’s “success” was the announcement that there would be a “second commitment period” under the irrelevant and defunct Kyoto Protocol, from 2013-2012.

And that was all. After all this time, no limit has been declared on the annual volume of CO2 the world may emit.

Extending the Kyoto protocol is as costly and pointless as regilding a mummy. When Al Gore was president of the U.S. Senate, it voted 95-0 not to ratify any treaty that did not bind third-world countries as well as the West. It has not changed its mind since. A couple of years ago, Mr. Obama did not dare put the cap-and-trade Bill to the Senate because he could not muster the 60 votes needed to pass it. A treaty requires at least 67 votes.

Canada and – effectively – Russia and Japan have resiled from the protocol. China, India and Brazil are not bound by it. They pay lip-service to the currently-fashionable “green” agenda, but China’s emissions now far outstrip those of the U.S. and, in a few years, will exceed those of the West as a whole.

So who is still in the Kyoto process? Effectively, only the goody-two-shoes tyranny-by-clerk that is today’s EU, and the People’s Republic of Australia. No one else is playing. No surprise, then, that global CO2 concentration continues to rise monotonically.

Even if everyone had complied with the Kyoto Protocol, the difference in global temperature by 2050 would not have been measurable by any modern instrument or method. But two-thirds of the world were exempt, one-sixth did not and will not play and the rest are irrelevant. The achievement of 18 years’ U.N. climate conferences: nil.

We are no longer part of the problem, so – whatever we do – we will not be part of the solution. In any case, there is no climate problem. An unscheduled 40-second intervention from an observer at the closing plenary session reminded delegates that there has been no global warming for 16 of the 18 years of annual U.N. climate conferences, and that typical measures to prevent warming are 50 times less cost-effective than adapting in a focused way to any adverse consequences that may occur.

What should the nations of the world do now that they have learned to enjoy meeting once a year? Here is UKIP’s agenda:

1. Spend not a single red cent on trying to make global warming go away. No more climate change departments, wind and solar subsidies, carbon taxes, clean development mechanisms or fuel and power surcharges. Scrap the lot.

2. Cancel all conscience-stricken payments from the West to grasping, indolent third-world countries in reparation for supposed “climate debt”. We owe them nothing.

3. Assist nations such as the Philippines to improve their resilience to extreme weather, which has always happened, will always happen, and has nothing much to do with man-made global warming. Tropical cyclones and typhoons are generally less frequent, intense and long-lasting now than at any time in the past 100 years.

4. Establish a highly-mobile international task force able to move at a moment’s notice to any disaster zone worldwide to provide immediate emergency relief. When the tsunami struck Japan, Tokyo asked David Cameron to send all the aircraft carriers we had, to act as emergency search-and-rescue helicopter platforms. Cameron had sent our last aircraft-carrier to a Turkish scrap-yard the week before, saying he could see no reason why we would ever need one again.

5. Prepare for the next Ice Age. It is 6000 years overdue. A drop of 3 Cº in global temperature would do real harm: a rise of 3 Cº would do no net harm at all. In the obsession with non-existent global warming, no preparations at all have been made for the survival of the human race if the glaciers return to Yorkshire and New York. On past form, their return will be swift and deadly.

4 Responses to The elaborate irrelevance of Doha

The way to prepare for an ice age, or indeed almost any global climate change, is to develop a spacegoing civilisation. Once we have this it will be easy to produce square miles of tinfoil in orbit which, depending on their placement, can be either mirrors, reflecting more sonshine on Earthj or shades preventing warming.

With a civilisation building solar power satellites, which caqn provide unlimited energy, contriolling the weather woyuld be a minor add-on. I also agree wuth Christopher than an ice age is more likely and far more damaging than warming would be. As SopaceX are demonstrating building such a spacegoing civilisation is easy any time governments allow it and if UKIP’s commitment to using the money we waste on the useless European Space Agency in an X-Prize fund instead bears fruit Britain will be a, possibly the, leading country in exploiting the unlimited opportunities.

With regards to point 1) of UKIP’s agenda, and the defunding of climate change departments. I understand that you don’t want this area of science to have special status and funding. However, I wouldn’t want to see it totally defunded, that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

We know the climate changes over the long term, and this is a valid area of scienctific inquiry, as are many others. For instance, in point 5) you point out that we are overdue a sudden and dramatic shift in temperature with the start of the next glacial period, and that we should prepare for it. But what would the study of this be, if not the study of climate change?

So, rather than totally defunding climate change departments, simply let them compete for funding on an equal platform with other areas of science, which are also much deserving of funding and study, and have much to contribute to the UK’s future economic prosperity.

Technically that is a fair point but I suspect proper funding of real climate change research, compared say with research into research into the far more serious problem of solar massive flare (bigger than the Carrington Event a century and a half ago) knocking out electrictiy generation worldwide would mean the loss of 999 thousandths of it.

One suggestion Jerry Pournelle has made is that at 10-30% of research in this and many other politically loaded science fields should be deliberately required to go to research aiming to be sceptical. It says much about how the term “science ” is misused because in principle ALL science is supposed to be sceptical.

“An unscheduled 40-second intervention from an observer at the closing plenary session reminded delegates that there has been no global warming for 16 of the 18 years of annual U.N. climate conferences”

Although the information is true, I feel that Lord Monkton should have owned up over who that observer was, Posing as a delegate from Myanmar.